Game objectives

Emulator used: BizHawk 1.11.8.1

Semi-pacifist version

Avoids killing some fish to save time

Unofficial game

Genre: Action

Comments

This is a TAS of Aquaventure for the Atari 2600. Aquaventure is an unreleased game for the 2600 made in 1983 (according to the build). This game involves a diveman on his quest to collect treasure so he can gave it to some random mermaid while he avoids some random killer fish. CGR Review

This TAS goes through the first 2 loops of the game without killing too many fish, so our hero can collect as much treasure as he can.

Game mechanics

The Loops

You dive through several screens until you find treasure. Then you go back and give the treasure to a mermaid and go to the next stage. You go through several levels until it loops back to the same amount of screens you started originally.
Only differences are that colors change, fish change looks and the fish move faster, there really are no other differences. I chose only 2 loops cuz there really isn't that much else to this game, it just gets too repetitive later on.

The Fish

When you come close to a fish, it goes after you and you have 1 of 2 choices: you avoid it (which is what I do most of the run) or kill it, which wastes time. It wastes time because when you kill a fish, a smaller fish will spawn, and it can either kill you, or take a while to be killed, when you're transitioning screens. I only kill and spawn a fish once or twice in the run, because if I wouldn't they would've killed me. I couldn't find a way to fully avoid it while collecting treasure and don't stop moving upwards/downwards, because he moves slower in the first loop in comparison to the 2nd loop which I managed to avoid, so this wastes some frames.

Screen Transitions

As I said, when you transition a screen, fish get automatically killed, and when smaller fish die due to this they take longer to kill. I don't know why this happens, but it wastes time, so I avoid spawning fish as much as possible. However I still kill fish with my shots without wasting time just for entertainment (which isn't really a lot of that in this run).

Other comments

Special Thanks to DwainiumB for posting in the thread. Also thanks to Alyosha for his amazing improvements with the Atari 2600 core in BizHawk. Thanks to Pokota for the temp encode.

Screenshot..?

Sorry no screenshot. Taking screenshots for atari games is very weird and they look blurry as balls when streched (reference the latest atari movie).

feos: This run, as it is now, can't be accepted, because it completes an arbitrary set of loops. Let's see if it could be.

For Vault, which is the only option for such a run given its feedback, we need a clear end point for endless games, and this game doesn't offer much: it just keeps going through the loops, seemingly increasing the fish speed. And this is how it should be optimally played when aiming for pure speed: one just needs to go to the second screen of each level and instantly go up again, meeting the mermaid. Diving any further is not required, unless one feels like collecting the treasures.

The treasures in this run are also not as clear as Vault rules would wish, because it's an item that is there in every level in basically the same spot every time, it's just getting harder to grab it due to increasing fish speed. But all it gives you is score boost, no reward or official mention in a manual (like in the case of #4591: adelikat's NES Donkey Kong Original Edition "All Items" in 01:33.83, while for this game, no manual ever existed).

So regarding the first requirement - "Games that loop endlessly can still be defined. The completion point is one where there is no new content, and the game is no longer increasing in difficulty." - we do not know if this game ever stops speeding up the fish, and even then, the gameplay for any% wouldn't get affected by that, as it's just swimming across one screen over and over. If instead of stopping increasing in difficulty the game just wraps around (like Ghosts'n'Goblins does, where after loop 127 enemies start moving backwards and other sorts of absurd stuff happens), that would mean one has to beat 256 loops, with the later ones being heavily glitched. And we don't have such precedents, as it's not an intended point to stop increasing the difficulty, but an occasional and arbitrary one.

The second requirement - "Goal choice criteria must be clear and non-controversial (a clear consensus on what constitutes full-completion or when a game is completed)." - means that if we are to define what this run actually does as "full completion", we can't just decide on a whim that gabbing the only item in the game every level, or swimming across all the screens, is full completion, just because there's no source of authority here: the game doesn't reward you, there's no manual to address that, there's no track kept of what you accomplish, etc. So the possibility for a "full completion" run for this game is also sickly and dingy.

There is yet another Vault requirement - "Unlicensed and homebrew games are eligible but may be judged on a game-by-game basis based on their notability." And this game doesn't seem to be popular or notable from a simple Google or Youtube search.

Given all the above problems, I'm rejecting this run, with no foreseeable chance for this game to ever get accepted in any form.